Banned Books Week 2017: For the Freedom of Speech

September 30, 2017

On this last day of Banned Books Week, we showcase titles that promote free speech. From civil libertarianism, to the 1960s Free Speech Movement, to the current protests at UC Berkeley’s “Free Speech Week“, these titles inspire us to think critically about the impact of #freespeech on our society’s current intellectual landscape.

“[D]elivers an incisive and sobering account of reaction, of academic complicity in restoring the status quo and its exclusionary, anti-intellectual structures. Roderick Ferguson’s writing on the university is always on time, always urgent, and always aware that the struggle over knowledge is inseparable from the fight for our lives.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“The connections between activism in the South and activism on the Berkeley campus have never been more vividly expressed than in Savio’s own words.”—Paul Buhle, Brown University

“Insightfully contextualized by Robert Cohen, Mario Savio’s letters and speeches … reveal Savio as an activist and thinker who helped inject new meanings into the idea of American freedom.”—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, author of The Story of American Freedom

“A must read for grassroots activists, Shaw offers indispensable insights into the strategies and tactics necessary to overcome powerful interests. This new edition significantly expands and updates the original, which is an organizing classic.”—Van Jones, author of Rebuild the Dream

“There is nothing like it in the literature on modern universities.”—Harriet Zuckerman, Senior Vice President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“This is an important work for the history of higher education and for the University of California by an extraordinary scholar and leader.”—Jonathan Cole, John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University and former Provost, Columbia University

“This is a superb book. We are well-launched into a new generation of ’60s scholarship, and The Free Speech Movement will be at the center of it. The analysis and personal recollection mix well, arguing persuasively for the never-to-be-underestimated place of contingency in history.”—Todd Gitlin, author of Media Unlimited and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

Contemporary civil libertarians claim that their works preserve a worthy American tradition of defending free-speech rights dating back to the framing of the First Amendment. Transforming Free Speech challenges the worthiness, and indeed the very existence of one uninterrupted libertarian tradition.